Wood Group has renewed its sponsorship of the Wood Group Chair of Arctic and Harsh Environment Engineering at Memorial University for a second five-year term, from 2014 to 2019.

The research chair in the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science will benefit both undergraduate and post-graduate engineering students. With the Arctic and cold regions a strategically important and challenging area of future industry development, Wood Group’s objective is to develop enabling technology and environmentally robust solutions for offshore oil & gas developments in these regions. Wood Group is investing $500,000 CDN to sponsor the chair over the next five-year period. Over the past five years, Wood Group’s similar investment has been leveraged by government and other funding agencies to enable additional research to be performed through the chair program.

“We are very pleased to extend Wood Group’s investment in Arctic and harsh environment engineering technology, and to continue to support research delivered from Newfoundland and Labrador,” said Mike Straughen, Group director of HSSE and executive sponsor of the program. “Several of our business units - Wood Group Kenny, Wood Group Mustang and Wood Group PSN - are firmly committed to extreme environment technology development in key areas such as subsea and pipeline engineering, ice mechanics and Arctic structures. The new chair at Memorial University will continue the excellent work of Dr. Shawn Kenny, the outgoing chair, to support our partnership with the community there.”

“I thank the Wood Group for their continued contribution to Memorial’s research capacity,” said Dr. Gary Kachanoski, president and vice-chancellor of Memorial University. “We are particularly well-positioned to conduct leading-edge research in ocean and harsh environment engineering, and the renewal of this funding is a clear endorsement that the work being done at this institution is world class, particularly in oil and gas exploration and production in Arctic and harsh environments.”

The selection process for the chair is underway and the successful candidate will be appointed in 2014.